Speaking to .net, Lawson agreed that the current situation was veering too close to replacing app-store silos with vendor-specific web-app silos. This could also threaten any big shift on mobile towards the web and away from native apps.

“The biggest danger to the web was — and is — the lack of interoperability between browsers,” he confirmed. On existing problems, he hoped they would be resolved: “Interoperability has been largely addressed for websites by HTML5, to the great credit of the competing browser vendors who've worked together to make this happen. Let's hope the System Applications Working Group can achieve this for applications, too.”.